Date: Mon, 21 Aug 1995 11:52:38 -0500
From: mohr richard d
Clean Up Our Parades?
by Richard D. Mohr
(May 1994)
Gay parades will be getting more media attention than ever
this June. With America's love of centennials and such, the
media will have their lenses focused on the 25th-anniversary of
the Stonewall Riots. Add to this, the attention the Gay Games &
Cultural Festival in New York City will draw, especially with its
triumphal march on the United Nations, multiply this, in turn, by
the national press's recent fascination with all things gay, and
we will be seeing a veritable media frenzy centered around our
public displays of gay life, gay love, and gay politics.
Paralleling this increased press attention to gay presence,
gay conservatives, like Hunter Madsen, Mel White and Bruce Bawer,
have been calling ever more frequently and loudly for gays to
clean up our parades -- to throw out not just NAMBLA but leather
folk and drag queens too. Their argument is that mainstream
media always focus on the more colorful bands of the gay spectrum
and so promote stereotypes of gays as either John Wayne Gacys or
dithering irresponsible nellies and thereby strike fear of gays
into America's heartland.
But these conservative assimilationists simply don't
understand how stereotypes work in society. Keeping leather
pants and feather boas out of the parades will do nothing to
reduce stereotyping. For stereotypes are not inductions from
skewed samples, generalizations that can be corrected and made
scientific simply by randomizing the cases examined. Stereotypes
are social creations that centrally serve to define and maintain
a culture's conception of itself. Thus, stereotypes of gay men
as sissies, nellies, and limp-wristed queens prop up still
powerful sex-role expectations in America, while the stereotypes
of gay men as sex crazed maniacs and especially as child
molesters serve to give the traditional American family a false
sheen of innocence; these stereotypes preach that the problems of
the American family must be external rather than internal to it.
Because stereotypes are the products of a culture's vision
of itself rather than of science gone bad, they are sustained by
cultural means, say, by jokes and slang, that make no pretense of
scientific accuracy, and so stereotypes continue to be
transmitted quite independently of "the facts." The only way to
change social reality here is to get it to face moral reality,
which includes dykes on bikes and snap queens in the bubbly
booming good of America's commitment to the blessings of liberty.
Bruce might just try taking a "Bruce" to lunch. Bruce would
probably even learn something from taking a member of NAMBLA to
lunch.
To clean up parades in hopes of immediate political
expedience is to deny gay experience and culture, and to
sacrifice it to and for the values of others -- to be dignified
without having dignity. Dignity is not buying into the other
guy's values just because he's in power. Dignity is asserting
that one's own values are worthy of consideration on a par with
any other -- including those of the dominant culture.
And don't be mistaken: bigots cannot be appeased by denying
gay experience. Indeed they have capitalized on low-key gay
political campaigns and gay invisibility by claiming there really
is not much, if any, anti-gay discrimination in America anyway,
and so (they claim) legal protections for gays are not needed.
Low-key, faceless, gayless campaigns simply play right into this
rationalization, so popular now with neo-conservatives, who want
to avoid sounding patently prejudicial.
So for the sake of gay dignity and gay values, mainstream
folk out there need to see real, live, breathing, justifiably
angry gay people saying, "How dare you presume." Low-key
campaigns simply leave the discussion of gay issues to the
opposition, who have been very clever at framing the debates and
whose sound-bites have an automatic draft on the still massive
repository of cultural prejudices -- "No Special Rights," "Adam
and Eve, Not Adam and Steve." The world needs to see just how
special we are and needs to see Adam and Steve, perhaps bolstered
by the possibility and protection of a gay parade, holding hands
and smooching publicly in order to show that, yes, they too are
married in the eyes of God and their community.
-30-